This movie is both a reason not to lose hope in Hollywood, and at the same time painfully reminds us how tame, boring and stupid most of the action genre has become.
Paul Verhoeven never used more efficiently the unparalleled resources Hollywood has to offer. With a decent - but not overblown - budget, he manages to show a spectacular display of action and great special effects that you can still watch today without laughing, unlike many other 80's movies.
The story (a cop working in a corruption-ridden society is brutally murdered and turned into a robotic law enforcer) is fairly simple, and in other hands could've ended like many other childish action movies. But the satiric tone and the full-frontal violence not only validates the humor, but helps the audience to understand the social critic without hammering it down. It's a moral tale, but certainly not a lecture.
The unbelievable boldness of the tone and the nifty execution turns this sci-fi/political pamphlet into a "Clockwork Orange"-like phenomenon. It's not aimed at kids, but if the brutality wasn't so over-the-top it should be shown to the youngest moviegoers, as the REAL action movie. No over-use of CGI. No annoying sidekick. No stupid humor or "satisfactory" ending. No compromise.
The 21st century truly NEEDS a movie like this. Not a remake, or a reboot, or whatever fancy name the studios come up with. Just a new kind of no-nonsense, clever, ambitious big budget movies that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence for a change. To settle the score with subsequent shallow Hollywood flicks whose makers brag about carrying on RoboCop's legacy while reaching for the lowest common denominator ("Iron Man", anyone?). To set a new standard in blockbusters, an alternative to silly, brainwashing and heartless "entertainment". The sooner's the better.
Paul Verhoeven never used more efficiently the unparalleled resources Hollywood has to offer. With a decent - but not overblown - budget, he manages to show a spectacular display of action and great special effects that you can still watch today without laughing, unlike many other 80's movies.
The story (a cop working in a corruption-ridden society is brutally murdered and turned into a robotic law enforcer) is fairly simple, and in other hands could've ended like many other childish action movies. But the satiric tone and the full-frontal violence not only validates the humor, but helps the audience to understand the social critic without hammering it down. It's a moral tale, but certainly not a lecture.
The unbelievable boldness of the tone and the nifty execution turns this sci-fi/political pamphlet into a "Clockwork Orange"-like phenomenon. It's not aimed at kids, but if the brutality wasn't so over-the-top it should be shown to the youngest moviegoers, as the REAL action movie. No over-use of CGI. No annoying sidekick. No stupid humor or "satisfactory" ending. No compromise.
The 21st century truly NEEDS a movie like this. Not a remake, or a reboot, or whatever fancy name the studios come up with. Just a new kind of no-nonsense, clever, ambitious big budget movies that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence for a change. To settle the score with subsequent shallow Hollywood flicks whose makers brag about carrying on RoboCop's legacy while reaching for the lowest common denominator ("Iron Man", anyone?). To set a new standard in blockbusters, an alternative to silly, brainwashing and heartless "entertainment". The sooner's the better.